Features: Succession Planning

As an employer looking to fill a role, whether newly created or recently vacated, it is critical that you look within your existing teams. From Beatrice Bartlay, entrepreneur, author and business & life performance coach.

Succession planning used to be relatively straightforward. Traditionally, large companies would use a structured approach to identify potential internal replacements to be prepared for the day when a senior manager would retire, hopefully ensuring a smooth succession and the least possible disruption to business as usual.

Think succession and you instantly associate it with maintaining the quality of future senior leadership, ensuring it is ready to operate in a volatile and difficult marketplace. But now the onus is on a growing need to focus on a wide range of critical, non-leadership and specialist roles. There is a real and understandable fear of losing valuable knowledge and intellectual capital and a necessity for organisations to change their approach.